the house relentlessly until her death in 1953, at whiçh time the house was sold to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Re- search, which sold it to Lauder. YIVO had filled the rooms with of- fices, but, to save money, never stripped away the original oak panelling. The elaborate interior details were simply covered up. Lauder asked Selldorf to re- store the building as much as possible and, at the same time, to make it func- tion as a contemporary museum, with modern lighting, mechanical systems, and elevators. The process took four years. Selldorf has gone through the building with a light hand, adding pris- tine, delicate touches to Carrère &Has- tings's heavier, grander ones. The result is a kind of gentle modernism of utter pre- cision, with perfect proportions. "Ronald was in love with the building and with the idea of having it look in- tact," Selldorf said. '1\nd I didn't want to make a big statement and put in a trans- parent elevator or something." But she was uncomfortable with pretending that her new elevator was original, so she de- signed its cab to look like those of the el- evators in the Seagram Building-"my homage to Mies van der Rohe," she said-and then she encased the elevator shaft in white glass, which almost blends in with the white walls of the original building. Selldorf and Price turned the former music room, which is lined with marble pilasters, into a gallery for the major Austrian paintings, and put Austrian decorative art objects, which include a grandfather clock by Ado]f Loos and a chair by Koloman Moser, into the oak- panelled drawing room that runs along Fifth Avenue. The third floor, which is devoted mainly to German art and dec- orative objects, had to be rebuilt entirely, and Selldorf made new rooms, with ex- quisitely simple bare-bulb light fixtures and stark planked floors. Lauder also turned the original pan- elled library into a bookstore specializ- ing in German and Austrian art books. The bookstore will be run by Faith Pleasanton, who for years managed the late and much lamented Wittenborn art bookstore, on Madison Avenue. ("Not a day goes by when someone doesn't come in and say 'Faith!' " Renée Price said. "She knows everyone, and she knows all of the books.") 40 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 3, 2001 "I look around this place and try to find what is wrong, what I would do dif- ferently if I were starting allover," Lauder said. "I can't find anything I would change." -Paul Goldberger LESSONS PIANO MAN, PART TWO t IÞJ :ç- - \ O ne thing Billy Joel does not do is take himself too seriousl and he wants to make sure that everyone knows it. "So I've just written a classical record, so what?" he said the other night as he waited to take the stage at Cooper Union's Great Hall, where he was leading a master class in piano. "Look at what I called the album. "Fantasies &Delusions.' I wanted it to be just 'Delusions.' You know? Like, who the hell do I think I am? But people said, 'Oh, it's too negative, it's too self-deprecating.' "He nodded firmly: "Real Joel." Then he said, "I don't even want to call it classical. It's more like ro- mantically influenced, instrumental, pre- twentieth-century music. I'm writing this because this music is mv first love." .I Joel, who was dressed all in black (form-fitting turtleneck, blazer, new jeans), is fifty-two-years old and has a graying goatee and a closely tonsured, receding hairline, which he also does not take seriously: ("There are people who ac- tually cut their hair like this, like it's a look Unbelievable.") He pointed out that the album, his fust in eight years, has been No.1 on Billboard's classical chart seven weeks in a row and counting. "Even with my pop albums, I've never been No.1 for a month," he said. "This is awesome. You know who No.2 is? Yo-Yo fucking Ma. This is a legitimate classical artist. I want to write him a letter, you know, 'I'm so ' This guy is a shtarker. How do you spell that? It means a big heavy hitter. This is the Babe Ruth of the cello, and we're keeping him out of No. I." Most of the undergraduates in the audience, it's safe to sa were not there to hear selections from the new album. "I don't know it," Becka Ollmann, a sopho- more at N.Y.U., said. "But my dad's a singer, and he does a lot of old Billy Joel songs. My dad used to play like three hundred nights a year. In Minnesota." The audience went nuts when Joel came out, walking across the stage the way a college football coach paces the sidelines, shoulders fust and head down. He told the crowd "When I was getting started, I wrote to the Beatles to ask what they were thinking when they wrote certain songs, and then I get this brochure back. But I wish that 1 had been able to ask them how to navigate the music business. There's a lot of job to the gig. I can help you kids, because I got all this stuff" He gestured to his head. Joel's stage routine turned out to be less a master class than a standup- heavy lounge act, somewhere between Victor Borge and Andrew Dice Clay. There were deft impressions of the Rolling Stones, Procol Hamm, Gordon Light- foot, and the Beatles (he made some vaguely French-sounding noises before launching into "Michelle"). There were stories about opening for the Beach Boys, the Doobie Brothers, and Olivia Newton-John ("She had three dressing rooms-one for Olivia, one for Nevvton, and one for John"). Mter a while, Joel started taking requests for his old pop hits. He sat at the piano and played ' - ways a Woman," and when he finished he said, "Thank you. That'll be seventy- five thousand fricking dollars." When the crowd was good and warmed up,Joel introduced RichardJoo, the twenty-eight-year-old pianist who performs all of Joel's compositions on the new classical album. "I just want to say that Billy Joel has always been a clas- sical composer to me," said Joo, who has silky shoulder-length hair and wore tails. "Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin are definitely his grandfa- thers and Lennon and McCartney his distant cousins." Joo sat down at a piano facing Joel's, and the two of them per- formed a couple of pieces from "Fan- tasies &Delusions." Sensing that the au- dience was resdess during "Innamorato," a number that Joel had described as "ro- mantic," he got up from his bench and began humping the keyboard to demon- strate while Joo played on. "I don't play on this record and I don't sing on it," Joel said at one point. He as- sumed a superhero action pose and froze it. "Next one, I ain't even gonna write it." -Eric Konigsberg